Her novels, especially We Who Are About To… and The Female Man, made me re-think almost everything, turned me on to feminist SF, and (with regards The Female Man especially) made me laugh out-loud, a lot.

The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen,
as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing,
teleconferencing, email and hypertext.

Go, marvel as a future we are only now lurching towards is laid out for all to see on a stage in California, 40 years ago.

Be incredibly frustrated that it’s two generations later and we still haven’t made it as far as Engelbart could already see us getting only a year after the Summer of Love.

Despair further by slipping off and reading Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, ‘As We May Think’. Bush was thinking mechanically, not computationally, but his Memex still presages the Internet and interactive computing with remarkable prescience.

For the final kick in the pants of your optimism, consider that this 1945 essay is a fairly minor re-working of an earlier piece, ‘Mechanization and the Record’ which Bush wrote in 1939.

The fact this beastie isn’t anywhere near as fearsome as its name suggests is no disappointment, especially when you consider it’s likely a ‘living fossil’, having first appeared in much the form it is now way back in the Carboniferous.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything dodgy in the claims; just that the basic outline of the technique:

[the] new approach involves depositing a thin film of silver (measuring about 10
nanometers thick) onto a solar cell surface and heating it to 200° Celsius.
That breaks the film into flattened spheres, called islands, which are
about 100 nanometers in diameter. When struck by light, these islands
achieve the same feat as etching by a natural but complex process.
— Go Sun Solutions— ‘No Silicon Needed’— Thursday, 26 April 2007

Next on my ‘things I’d rather think about than work’ tour, there’s Rachel Hillmer and Paul Kwiat’s Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American. I think they overstate the ‘readily available’ nature of the equipment you need (polarising film isn’t as common as they hint) but it’s a simple experiment to conduct if you do have the equipment. And it’s impressively effective at making quantum effects real and tangible (at least it was for me when I conducted the experiment here at Casa de Forte).

Wandering from physics back to the biological sciences, Kerry Grens has a article in The Scientist on the possibility a single transcription factor (ie a protein that controls whether or not a gene is expressed) might be the key to understanding and perhaps even treating or preventing addiction to a range of drugs of dependence.

Proteins are also discussed in Melissa Lee Phillips’ report on the discovery that sea sponges ‘possess protein components of synapses, even though they don’t have nervous systems‘. The article doesn’t mention it (‘coz, let’s face it, why should it) but discoveries like this always give me a small thrill of schadenfreude at the whole ‘irreducible complexity’ nonsense still being schilled by Michael Behe, Michael Denton and co.

I’m not normally a fan of Flash, but Oppenheimer’s journey would be difficult to take using plain-old CSS and HTML. It’s worth noting, however, the use of Flash makes their admonition to turn off your pop-up blocker more than a self-interested statement.

If this isn’t enough to get you into deadline-slippage territory, the folks at the Bradshaw Foundation have lots more high-quality time-suckage to help you understand the epic human journey while away several days learning fascinating stuff that won’t help in any practical way at all.